the great
Sound-steamers are pushing out from their piers. We feel quite
humiliated on our lonely ferry-boat as these leviathans of nautical
architecture sweep past us with an imperious curve far out into the
stream, and then move steadily and statelily down the middle of the
river, like an "ugly duckling" of mammoth proportions. One never gets
over the sensation of that sight, nor its impressions as a type of our
century,--a vast floating hotel, carrying the population of a village
and the luxurious appointments of a palace, gliding as smoothly and
noiselessly as an Indian's canoe, and propelled by an internal force
apparently as vital and secret as that which moves the Indian's arm.

Yonder comes an ocean-steamer, long, low, and black, with a tri-color
flag at the stern, slowly and puffily tugged by a little pilot-boat. The
decks literally swarm with figures in all sorts of outlandish
garb,--gray and blue stuffs, long shaggy ulsters, Scotch caps and
plaids, gay kerchiefs on the women's heads and necks. Some lounge,
smoking or gibbering, over the taffrail, other groups sit picturesquely
on their large rude boxes, but most of them are suggestively silent and
statuesque. And well they may be, for it is the moment of fate to the
poor emigrant as much as for Columbus when he approached the shore of a
new world. A new world, indeed, in far more than the geographical sense;
a new life, or at least a new attempt to live; old things passed away,
and all things to be new--except himself. A great wave of homelessness
in the wide world, and perhaps of sickness for the old home, sweeps over
the poor exile's heart. All is so strange, and so sternly independent of
their forlorn and insignificant selves. Perhaps they are being unladen
from the ship, shunted down the gang-plank along with their chests,
packed on a transfer-boat like so many imported cattle, only not with
the care or tenderness with which a drove of Holsteins or Jerseys would
be handled. A squad of emigrants, just landed on the wharf and waiting
to be transferred to the emigrant-train for another week's voyage by
land to the ends of the continent, is one of the most pathetic sights in
this world, especially if they are foreign to our speech and dress and
modes of life. How wistful and helpless and strayed they look!--a bit of
still and stranded life in the sweep and roar of a world that must seem
to them as wild and as soulless as the ocean they have just left. How
unc